XQuery has achieved Candidate Recommendation and I think it's safe to say that many individuals, organizations and vested interests are working hard to make sure it reaches Recommendation as smoothly as possible.
With this significant milestone achieved, Jonathan Robie, the Progress DataDirect W3C representative, blogs about XQuery Updates today. He is appealing to the community at large to give their feedback to our working group on the kinds of use cases they anticipate for XQuery Updates. The product of this feedback cycle will eventually look something like the XQuery Use Cases.
Although this was far before my time in the software industry, XQuery is entering the next stage in it's evolution, similar to how SQL evolved in the 80's. SQL was originally specified a query language only, and to this day it maintains the name Structured Query Language. You can read more about the history here. SQL quickly adopted update characteristics in subsequent revisions. If you have ideas, you are certainly free to talk about them here, or you can go straight to the source and check out Jonathan Robie's blog to send him your ideas directly.